Tesla Seeking Hardcore Software Engineers For Autopilot Full Autonomy

Today’s Autopilot is technically considered to be in the Beta stage. Later on, Tesla will release an updated Firmware that will likely bring Autopilot into a more official state. But beyond that, Tesla is looking for full autonomy (well beyond today’s lane keeping, auto braking, etc) within a few year’s time.

To achieve full autonomy, the Model S, Model X and Model 3 will require additional hardware and loads of specialized software. On the software front, Tesla is now seeking “hardcore software engineers” who will report directly to Elon Musk.

In fact, it was Musk who took to Twitter to announce (see Tweets above) the job openings. Musk notes that Autopilot development is “super high priority.”

If interested in applying for a position, just email a code sample or link to your work to autopilot@teslamotors.com.

I personally agree, that’s the only long-term goal that makes sense, I just think it’s further out (time wise), than he seems to think, I’m guessing L4 is 10-15 years away, given all the “strange boundary conditions” that drivers run into as well as liability/legal/regulatory concerns (read as Hong Kong)

That said, capturing data from the current “beta” cars, and using that to improve the system is a great way to capture and better understand those boundary conditions – So I given him credit for “going all in” (many other seems to shy away from the liability concerns) – And long term (50 years), he’s definitely correct, that L4 stuff will indeed come, and it will be a “game changer” for society (up there with the development of the car itself, versus the horse) – I just think he’s a bit overly optimistic on the timeline to develop and deploy all this (car stuff, as well as GPS and legal infrastructure)

I’m also mildly surprised that no one seems to be “concerned” (read bitching) about “privacy concerns” of what data the Tesla beta cars are reporting back today – Is it GPS info, is it video from the cameras, radar sensor data, etc? – They definitely NEED that info, to improve the system – but just surprised there isn’t concern around “Tesla is tracking me” from the “tin foil hat” crowd – Perhaps Google and Waze have already “plowed the hard earth” in this regard.

Unfortunately, we may just need a serious accident before the lawyers still digging into the details…

Yeah I caught that too.
And where else could one reach more engineers for free?
And for those who want a great job I’d suggest you go to a local Tesla dealer as they need techs badly a growing at high rates are going to double their need by next yr.
They likely have their own training as normal automotive training is of little use other than chassis, body work. If I was young I’d sure get one of them.

It’s nothing to do with Po.. That’s terminology used in some circles of hardware engineering. If you have dirty mind, there are literally hundreds of engineering terminology that can be construded in other ways.

Most people already know how to drive a car. It is easier to teach a new employee about use cases, programming goals, etc. than superior programming skills. Elon is a competent programmer and they have hired game programmers at both Tesla and SpaceX, they’ve been around the block, they know what they are doing.

Is it easier to provide use cases for conditions that you CANNOT predict, or conditions you know in advance?

Think Space X, the latter. Earth’s rotation, speed of wind, air temperature, etc. All you can find out in advance, in terms of days. Shoot the rocket straight up, then try to have it landed. Easy, no? Elon must have hired top notch engineers from aerospace and aeronautics industries, right? So every test and flight was a success, correct?

And I wonder – software engineers to “learn” and design a system with human lives involved?

I personally don’t think a guru programmer can get this problem solve. Autonomous driving is complicated, requiring in-depth/cutting-edge knowledge in real-time sensor data fusion, image processing, pattern recognition, decision making, robotics etc. good programming is just the final step of this thing, but not the deterministic one.

Well, that might help… However, money is just one thing to look at. Unfortunately Autopilot seems not yet ready to allow work-while-you-drive, cause if that was the case those potential engineers would not depend on living close to the office, but have their office with them all the time. In europe we have this tendency of storage-on-the-rails, hopefully we’ll see similar trend with office-on-the-road 😉 With that P90D Tesla would provide office space and a testbed for the engineer. Also I see those engineers to be test-driver and marketing person at the same time. Would Tesla pay them for doing 3 jobs at the same time?

I imagine a worldwide distributed office on the road network would be a nice fit to tackle generalized=worldwide fully autonomous driving 😉